


My Father Fights With His Art

by fandumbandflummery, subtropicalStenella



Series: Art Is A Weapon [1]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Anarchy, Art as a weapon, Character Study, Gen, Propaganda, Story Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 08:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15554025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandumbandflummery/pseuds/fandumbandflummery, https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtropicalStenella/pseuds/subtropicalStenella
Summary: Alrich Wren doesn't look like a stereotypical Mandalorian, but war isn't always fighting with fists and swords.





	My Father Fights With His Art

Sabine's father was… not what I was expecting. I mean, it's not like I had much to go on regarding what Mandalorians looked like under their armor, just Sabine, her mom, and her brother. Maybe Fenn Rau, I guess but like, okay.

Sabine is fifteen kilos of detonite and FUCKING FIGHT ME stuffed into a five kilo bag, covered in spray paint.

Tristan was kind of surprising. I mean like, Sabine is  _ bitty _ , especially now that I've finally caught up to and  _ passed  _ her in body mass (thank you, puberty, you weren't  _ entirely  _ horrible) but her “baby” brother is almost as tall as Kanan and was probably assembled in a meat packing plant that specialized in really ridiculously aesthetically appealingly designed people. Or something.

And their mother is… Look, Ursa Wren is fucking terrifying. She's tall and elegant and she has this way of  _ Looking _ at you that makes your guts turn to watery mush while your soul attempts to escape by slithering out your asshole, but at the same time she's absolutely beautiful, the way a snow-covered mountain peak is beautiful. Overwhelming, cold, and if you cross her, the avalanche will crush you utterly. She's not even  _ that _ tall, it's just physical  _ presence. Kanan _ noticed it.

 

I figured Alrich Wren would be something like that. Or like Fenn Rau. Kind a mix of that and Sabine, except, y’know, older and bigger and a guy. Fenn's a fighter too, he just hides it better, seems like he's all cool and collected until he fuckin’ tazes you.

Like, I knew her father been part of the Kryt… Kyrts… Ker-something. DeathWatch. Whatever. The revolutionary-slash-terrorist group of disenfranchised Mandalorians, with Ursa and this new lady, Bo Katan, in the Old Days. And Sabine just would not  _ shut up _ about how important he was to the Mandalorian rebels, what an inspiration he was, to her and to Mandalore. A Titan in the eyes of the clans. So he's a warrior, right?

 

Wrong. 

 

He's a slender, soft-spoken man in his middle years, with no scars, and a small, neat beard and moustache. He's not even in armor, not even in the weird, thick, skintight beskar-nanoprene Sabine and Fenn wear underneath. He's in robes, fancy ones, like some kind of noble or something who got interrupted in an important council meeting, and he's holding Ursa Wren--Ursa  _ Fucking  _ Wren--carefully in his arms, like she's made of spun glass. He might be speaking quietly to her.

 

It doesn't make sense.

 

“Is there a reason you're trying to melt a hole through my mother's beskar?”

Tristan’s helmet hits the bench next to me with a thunk, followed by his butt, which also thunks. His whole body thunks in various places as he slumps back against the side of the transport next to me, stretching his long legs out as far as he can across the narrow space in his repainted armor. His new-old armor. Wren beskar, not Saxon plastoid. The lothcat on his shoulder is grinning at me, and he looks tired but happy. His short hair is still sweat-damp and I'm not a medic but I'm pretty sure he's a little concussed, because the pupils of his bright gold eyes--lighter than Sabine’s--are a little uneven. That, and, y’know, he's talking to  _ me. _ Still talking to me.

 

“What?” 

“You're staring at them,” he says, and tips his chin towards his parents. 

“Oh.”

“Why?”

“Uh.”

 

Maybe I'm the one that's concussed.

 

“What in the hell does, 'My father fights with his art’ mean?” I blurt, proving my case.

 

Tristan looks a little confused, brow furrowing.

 

“I mean… It doesn't make any sense. No offense to your father, but…” I tip my head towards the Wrens too. “How does a famous heiress and DeathWatch lieutenant and up with… well…”

“A quiet, skinny artist-type?” Tristan asks lightly.

“Well, yeah.”

Tristan chuckles and leans forward so his elbows rest on his knees, the sound set deeply in his broad chest. It  _ rumbles.  _

“You're a Jedi, right?”

“Uh… not really.”

 

I mean. Technically? Sort of? I fit more qualifications than anyone in the transport besides Kanan, at least. That seems to be good enough for Tristan, because he continues on.

 

“But you understand that a war isn't just about fighting. That people need something to fight  _ for.” _

 

I do, so I nod, and Tristan looks up at his father, who has taken his mother's good hand. 

 

“My father understands that too, and so did Pre Viszla.” 

“Pre Viszla? The… uh…”

“Oh don't get me wrong, he was a vicious, brutal, warmongering zealot who left Sundari in the hands of a Sith madman simply because that madman took power in the Old Ways: by the sword,” Tristan says quietly, looking back at me.

I'd heard about that. Not many details, but when a conquering warlord dies by beheading in his throne room by an alien Sith Lord who was supposed to be dead two or three times over, just days after said warlord had usurped the previous monarchy… word travels, becoming stories and legends. 

 

“But he had a vision, and a cause. He believed he was fighting for the very soul of Mandalore, and all her history. He needed to remind them of what they'd lost at the unarmed, unarmored hands of Duchess Satine Kryze,” Tristan continues, and sits up to pull his datapad out of a belt pouch. “My father's art was one of the ways he did that.”

 

He thumbs through a bunch of holos, too quickly for me to see them clearly, but a lot of them seem to feature him getting lovingly mauled by some sort of six-legged dog-lizard… thing with more gaping, toothy jaw than should reasonably fit in its skull.

He stops on a cityscape and hands the pad over, showing me the… side of a burning, graffitied building? 

 

Uh.

 

Look, I don't have a fancy Imperial Academy or Mandalorian heir/ess education and even if Sabine has… uh…  _ expanded my horizons _ on the definition of Art, I'm not sure a firebombed city square qualifies.

But he's watching me with those gold eyes gone soft and expectant, so I pretend to know what I'm looking at. 

 

I pretend long enough that I actually start to  _ see  _ it.

There's a person, in the flames. Not like, an actual person, it's painted, but he still looks alive.

 

And he's in mortal agony. 

 

You can tell, even though he's in full armor, in the arc of his spine and the backward tilt of his helmeted head with its stylized, symbolically added broken crown and his clutching hands, one of them wrapped around the hilt of the lightsaber sticking out of his chest.

 

No, wait.

The  _ Darksaber _ .

And the way he's holding it… Obviously, by now, I know my sword forms, and the way this guy is holding the hilt?

He put that sword in his heart himself.

 

And the fire… it's  _ part _ of the piece, eating away at the building, sure, but also the painted body of the man, and more importantly, his armor, which, thanks to today's many horrible lessons, I understood meant  _ everything _ to Mandalorians. Their armor was their history, their lives, their livelihood, unique to them.

I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it's still… evocative. It's beautiful and tragic and horrible and somehow  _ shaming _ , like it's my fault this man is in pain, because I'm just sitting here, watching it happen. Watching history burn away in white magnesium fire on a hundred-meter scale, stretching to the sky.

And I don't even know who he is, which makes it worse. I can't imagine how someone who would recognize the shape and style of his armor would feel, someone who would know that armor as well if not better than his face. Someone who would know just who they have failed. 

 

“This is…” 

I don't even have the words, but Tristan seems to get it, his smile small and satisfied, but enough to reach the corners of his eyes. They  _ are _ gold, like, really, really gold, almost metallic, and he has a tiny scar in his eyebrow, like he took a hit to the face once, which doesn't surprise me at--

 

“What’re we looking at?” 

 

Sabine doesn't thunk, she clanks, but that's still no excuse for her to be able to sneak up on me and throw herself down on the bench on my other side, her back to the side wall so she can fling her legs across my lap and into Tristan's. He seems used to it. 

 

“Dad’s Kyrtsad work. Concordance Plaza on Keldabe,” Tristan explains, sitting back a bit as Sabine lights up.

_ “Nice.  _ I liked his Sundari ones better.”

Tristan rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you would.”

“It's how he and Mother met,” Sabine argues defensively.

“It's how they  _ tell _ us they met,” Tristan counters, then looks at me as he explains. “We suspect they might have  _ actually  _ first met under slightly more scandalous circumstances.” 

Sabine snickers at my response of, “More scandalous than blowing up a building?” and reaches behind me to punch Tristan in the shoulder. 

“Did you show him Dad’s mug shot?”

Wait, what? “Mug shot?”

 

Both Wrens go for datapads, flicking through holos. 

“Well,  _ yeah _ , you don't think The Duchess would let someone just run around turning skyscrapers into militant anarchist propaganda, right?”

 

Okay, point. Sabine wins the race, and hands me her datapad.

 

It features the image of a young man, a little older than us but not by much, against a blank wall with a numbered placard hanging around his neck. One side of his head is shaved close to his scalp, the rest of his hair cascading down the side of his face in choppy waves of red, gold and bronze down to his chin,  _ exactly _ like the colors of a bonfire. His nose is very visibly broken, oozing more blood over his split-and-bleeding top lip as he snarls at the holocam, showing bloody teeth. I'm familiar with that expression, I've seen it on Sabine, except, y’know, without all the blood, because she wears a helmet when she pulls insane stunts, but it's really obvious which parent she resembles most.

 

“This was after he did his first piece in Sundari,” she explains, sounding fond and proud. “On the exterior of the prison itself. It took almost six months of preparation.”

Tristan's datapad shows a still from a holonet report: The same skinny young man being forcibly restrained by  _ three  _ people in uniforms that say Keldabe Interior Police on the sleeves. They're wrenching his arms behind his back. He's using them as support to rear back and plant the studded sole of a knee-high black leather boot in the face of a fourth officer, and he's obviously screaming something obscene at the top of his lungs, firelight flashing off the swinging chains on his pants and the spikes decorating his cut-off, patched vest.

 

ANARCHIST RING DEFACES CONCORDANCE PLAZA REDEDICATION MURAL, 16 INJURED, 3 DEAD IN EXPLOSION.

is the caption on the screen. 

 

Huh.

No wonder the Empire wanted him silenced. 


End file.
